The Cathexis team is always looking for ways to make evaluation a force for equity. We are excited to share one small outcome of this focus: an affirming way to ask survey respondents about gender! Here are some tips for your next survey: Don’t confuse sex and gender in your data! Broadly speaking, sex refers… More
Outcome mapping: An example of how to show your impact
Sometimes it is too early, or just not feasible, to show what your program’s long-term impact is. So what do you do? One option is to do some outcome mapping. This method draws on several sources to pull together a picture of long-term impact. Take the map below for Frontier College as an example. We… More
What’s in a name? Why Cathexis is called Cathexis…
Cathexis means to invest energy in a particular person, object or idea. As a company, we’ve taken it a step further and use the term to mean the positive channelling of energy. Pretty appropriate for evaluation, no? So where did the name come from? Well, it turns out that Cathexis founder, Martha McGuire, is a… More
The “Burning Question”: A Simple Tool to Focus Developmental Evaluation on What Matters
Peter and Rochelle recently contributed a tip of the day to the American Evaluation Association’s AEA365 blog, which offers great daily nuggets of evaluation wisdom. We’ve reposted their contribution below. Let us know if you end up using this method in your own Developmental Evaluation! The “Burning Question”: A Simple Tool to Focus Developmental Evaluation… More
Evaluating policy influence? Check out this guide
Originally produced to support the Public Health Agency of Canada’s Innovation Strategy Projects, A Guide to Policy-Influence Evaluation: Selected Resources and Case Studies could be useful for anyone planning and evaluating policy-influence work. The guide summarizes and references recent resources that can be used while planning an evaluation. It also includes three case studies which… More
The Cathexis Excel-lent tips & tricks
Since we use all kinds of programs daily in our evaluation work, we thought we would share some of our favourite Excel tips & tricks that we find save us time! Peter Conditional formatting – great for catching duplicates, outliers, and errors. If you highlight a group of cells, at the bottom right of the… More